12 Best Notepad++ Alternatives For Linux

Notepadd++ is a completely free source code editor created as a replacement for Notepad on Windows – is written based on Scintilla in C++ and implements Win32 API and STL to ensure program sizes are small with high execution speed – features which have since made it become a family name among developers. Sadly, there isn’t a version available for Linux users.

Here’s a list of the best Notepadd++ alternatives that you can run on your Linux distribution and be satisfied.

1. Vim Editor

Vim is a powerful, completely configurable text editor for creating any type of text. It is styled as “vi” which ships with Apple’s OS X and most Unix systems.

It is known for its multi-level undo tree, extensive plugin system, support for too many file formats and programming languages to list, and integration support with many tools.

Vim Editor

To know more about Vim editor, check out our following related articles.

3. GNU Emacs

GNU Emacs is a customizable, extensible, open source, self-documenting real-time display text editor in the EMACS family of text editors popular for their extensibility.

Its features including syntax highlighting support for many file formats and languages, customization using Emacs Lisp code or a GUI, full Unicode support, complete built-in documentation and tutorials, etc.

4. Gedit

Gedit is an open source text editor app designed for general-purpose text editing with a clean and simple GUI for ease of use. It is GNOME’s very own text editor and ships as the default text editor of the GNOME desktop environment.

8. Kate

Kate is used as an editing component in Quanta Plus, the LaTeX front-end, and KDevelop among other technologies. Its features include code folding, syntax highlighting that is extensible via XML files, automatic character encoding detection, etc.

9. Notepadqq

Notepadqq is a completely free source code editor created as a Linux alternative for Notepad++ which is available for only Windows. And just like Notepadd++, it aims to ensure that program sizes are small with high execution speed.

Its features include a simple, eye-candy UI with support for multiview editing, plugin extension, several programming languages, syntax highlighting, etc.

10. Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a powerful, extensible, completely customizable, cross-platform text editor created by Microsoft Corporation. It offers users on all platforms a unified environment for building and testing programs in any language for any platform.

VS Code features include IntelliSense, built-in Git commands, a debugger built-into the editor complete with debug breaks, call stacks, and an interactive console, support for almost any programming language, etc.

Visual Studio Code Editor

11. SciTE

SciTE is a SCIntilla-based text editor that was first created to demonstrate Scintilla but has since grown to be useful for developing and running programs that typically have simple configurations. It features a simple, tabbed, GUI with syntax highlighting, support for bidirectional text, helper scripts, configurable keyboard shortcuts, etc.

SciTE’s free version is available for Linux-compatible systems with GTK+ and Windows while a commercial version is up for download from the Mac App Store.

SciTE Text Editor

12. CodeLobster

CodeLobster is a completely free multifunctional and portable IDE designed for PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript projects with support for over 15 frameworks. It offers users almost all of the features in many paid applications such as pair highlighting, tooltips, PHP and JS debugging and advanced autocomplete, incremental find, etc.

The professional version contains features like SASS and LESS, split window compare, code validation, an SQL manager, etc. and a ton of additional plugins that are enterprise user-worthy.

Codelobster IDE

Summary

So there you have it guys. The 11 best text editor alternatives to Notepadd++ available for Linux. Do you know any efficient ones that you would like to see added to the list? Feel free to drop comments in the section below.

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Please stop putting Vim, eMacs, and Nano at the top of your recommendations… FFS! This right here is the reason we can’t even get the majority of software devs to work on Linux and are stuck with sub double digit market share…

Don’t get me wrong Nano is intuitive but if people are here looking for alternatives to Notepad++, they want a full GUI solution not some command line tool with keyboard only interaction. Sublime, Visual Studio Code, Atom, and Gedit should be the top 4 (not necessarily in that order).

With the aforementioned not even enumerated as part of the list, literally ok now that you’ve got what you came here for (a GUI code editor), if you have to remotely manage servers you’ll want to be familiar with one of these as well.

The first several options in your list really aren’t even comparable. Yes, you can edit text in a terminal. There’s a bit more you tend to get from a GUI editor. Sublime is imho the first option in your list that’s even comparable.

I really like sublime and vs code myself. I tend to reach for vs code more, because it’s free, open source, on all major platforms and has a very rich extension ecosystem and works with almost everything I need. The integrated terminal is hands down my favorite feature. Second is decent git integration.

Sublime Text is unquestionably a text editor to be reckoned with and for a while, it was my favorite choice even in the presence of the super friendly Atom until VS Code came along. Brackets is also cool but I haven’t used it extensively enough to choose it over Atom or VS Code.